Snt,—An hon. and rev. correspondent of yours has cited Leibnitz
as holding the orthodox opinion of eternal punishments ; a daily contemporary of yours has pointed out, with reference to Mr. Lyttelton's letter, that Leibnitz assignedrather rationalistic grounds for his orthodox opinions. It suited your contemporary's immediate purpose and space to cite only one of those grounds, and neither Mr. Lyttelton nor your contemporary took notice of the remarkable exposition and " improvement " by Leasing of Leibnitz's apologetic philosophy of eternal punishments.
It was not likely that a mind of the range of Leibnitz's, having, moreover, to reconcile with the doctrine in question his system of pre-established harmony, and " best of all possible worlds," should have upheld it exactly on the ordinary orthodox grounds, or exactly in the ordinary orthodox sense. One of his com- mentators has assumed that his real motive for entering the lists on that side was to obtain a recognition for his theory of the best of all possible worlds among those who believed in eternal punishment, by showing how that doctrine might, rationally be reconciled with his theory and with his general ideas of divine justice. Consider- ing how orthodoxy counteracted philosophy in the age of Leibnitz, there is nothing veryfar-fetched inthat supposition. Leibnitz might be supposed to feel the curb in his metaphysical, as he did in his physical inquiries. " No one," says Mr. Hallam (" Lit. of Europe ") " can read the Protogma' without perceiving that of all the early geologists, or indeed of all, down to a time not very remote, Leibnitz came nearest to the theories which are most received in the English school at this day. It is evident that if the literal in- terpretation of Genesis by a period of six natural days had not restrained him, he world have gone much farther in his views of the progressive revolutions of the earth. Leibnitz had made very minute inquiries, for his age, into fossil species, and was aware of the main facts which form the basis of modern geology."
Independently, however, of the soft collar of orthodoxy which Leibnitz may have felt round his neck, it is common to all philo- sophical minds—to Leibnitz, therefore, with Leasing—to be no whit more disposed to take up the crude and rude notions of heterodoxy than of orthodoxy. " I sun convinced," says Leasing, "and I think I can prove, that Leibnitz only acquiesced in the common doctrine of damnation, and was even willing to strengthen its exoteric grounds with new ones, because he perceived that it harmonized better than the opposite doctrine with a great truth of his esoteric philosophy.
" But I must first of all indicate that great esoteric truth itself for the establishment of which Leibnitz lent his countenance to the common doctrine of everlasting damnation. And what else could it be but the very pregnant axiom that in this world nothing is insulated, nothing without consequences, nothing without eternal consequences? If no sin, therefore, can be without con- 8,quences, and these consequences are the punishment of the sin,
how can these consequences be other than eternal, how can these consequences ever cease to have consequences ? . . . Not ouly may a moral being come to a halt in its progress to perfection— not only go back several stages—but I do not see why, without any
inconsistency with Leibnitz% general principle of world-perfection, such an individual being might not persist to all eternity in this back-going, and for ever recede farther and farther from its perfec- tion. On this possibility rest Leibnitz's esoteric ground for the endless duration of damnation, that ground being the endless continuation of sin. Only, to be quite orthodox, he ought to have deduced from thence not only eternal damnation, but eternal damnation increasing in intensity to all eternity."
According to Leasing, nobody is disposed to deny the eternity of natural punishments. " What do they deny, then? " he asks— "the eternity of hell? But is hell anything else than the abstract expression of these eternal punishments ?
" I think it is easy to point to the source of all the difficulties which have made men imagine they must deny the eternity of
damnation. As Scripture, in order to excite the liveliest impres- sion of that unhappiness which awaits the vicious, took almost all its infernal imagery from bodily pains, with which all men, without exception, are most familiar, it has happened that those bodily pains themselves, or at least their nature as affecting ours, have been taken not for the image, but for the thing itself ; and thus punish- ments have been aggravated into torments, torments into a state of torment, and the feeling of that state into a feeling excluding every other, and taking entire possession of our whole being. In short, the intensive eternity which, more or less, tacitly or expressly, is thoughtlessly attributed—or thought necessary to attribute—to the punishments of hell, this intensive eternity, which is neither grounded on reason nor Scripture, is the only thing which renders their eternal duration so incon- ceivable, so conflicting with the mercy and the justice of God, so revolting to our feelings and our understanding. . . . All this has arisen, I say, deliberately, from certain figurative expressions. There are other figurative expressions, if the parables are to be reckoned amongst such, which lead to juster ideas, and with which the eternity of punishments and the amendment of the punished may be held consistently. . . . Scripture intends nothing else when it speaks of the different degrees of hell and heaven."
Leming concludes that a doctrine common to all religions can- not well be without any foundation in reason, and that the truth —obscurely felt rather than clearly recognized—of the eternal consequences of sin was of itself sufficient to lead to it. That truth and the doctrine of eternal punishments are, indeed, the same thing, only more or less distorted by the effort to make it palpable to the senses. Leasing concludes by citing the Socratic or Platonic hell from the close of the" Gorgias," in which some of the condemned suffer pains and punishments in order to their amend- ment, and others incapable of amendment are tormented to all eternity as examples. The Platonic hell, too, had its purgatory —an intermediate state which, notwithstanding the abuse poured upon it bythe RomishChurch, Leasing holds that the Reformers need not, perhaps, so utterly have rejected. Purgatory was, in fact (so far as the ecclesiastical economy admitted sinners to it), a conces- sion by anticipation to the modern sentiment which is re-awaken-
ing.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant, A READER.
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